Field of the Disclosure
The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to compensating for utilized transmission times relative to a transmission opportunity (TXOP) limit.
Description of Related Art
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
A wireless communications network may include a number of network devices such as access points (APs) that can support communication for a number of wireless devices. A wireless device may communicate with a network device bi-directionally. For example, in a wireless local area network (WLAN), a station (STA) may communicate with an associated AP via downlink and uplink. The downlink (or forward link) refers to the communication link from the AP to the station, and the uplink (or reverse link) refers to the communication link from the station to the AP.
In WLANs, there may be cases in which multiple STAs are in communication with a particular AP. Access to the wireless medium may be controlled through a medium access control (MAC), which may allow different STAs to access a wireless channel according to enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) rules. Included in the EDCA rules is a transmit opportunity (TXOP) limit, which is a duration of time during which a STA is allowed to continually access the medium without backoff. A wireless network may have multiple different access priorities according to an access class of data that is transmitted using the wireless channel, each of which may have a different TXOP limit.
In order to enhance utilization of the wireless network, it may be desirable for different wireless devices accessing the wireless network to utilize relatively fewer TXOPs that each contain more transmitted data rather than relatively more TXOPs that each contain less transmitted data. For example, exceeding a TXOP limit may improve the efficiency when sounding or protection overhead needs to be amortized in a TXOP. Furthermore, in some cases, a TXOP limit may be set to zero for certain types of transmissions (e.g., Best Effort transmission priority transmissions), which implies that a single data transmission can take place. However, for low physical (PHY) layer data rates (such as 1 Mbps), this may cause relatively long transmissions, hence enhanced efficiency may be desirable in such cases.